Germans Give Climate Science The Big Thumbs Down

In Germany, climatology has become the Trabant of sciences.

Reading all the climate doom and gloom in the more prominent German online papers like Der Spiegel, Die Welt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, etc., you’d think by now readers would have long since barricaded themselves inside their homes and crawled under their beds in angst, in order to hide from the dreaded Klimakatastrophe

So frequent are the alarmist climate stories. Normally such stories would be better placed in the comics section. But in Germany newspapers don’t have a comics section, and so they get mixed in with the news.

Day after day normally respectable papers are filled with worst-case reports, often extracted from press releases dribbled out by tax-payer funded panic-houses like the authoritarian Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

But, hardly anyone believes them anymore:  90% to 10%.

Yesterday I read yet another rehashed panic story in Die Welt, whose title translates: Heat Waves Threaten With Increasing Frequency.

Very revealing are the reader comments. Judging from them, a majority of German readers scoff at the claims the planet is heating up catastrophically, and do so with a whoppingly huge majority. 

At Die Welt, readers who write comments can be rated by other readers with either a “thumbs up” if you agree with the comment, or a “thumbs down” if you don’t. So I counted up the number of “thumbs up” and the number of “thumbs down” for the first 20 reader comments that appeared after the above mentioned piece. The result (Saturday, 5:15 pm): 

Number agreeing with the sceptics:   1864  (90.2%)
Number agreeing with the warmists:  203  (  9.8%) 

Wunderbar! Alarmist climate science has lost its credibility, authority and trust, it seems. There’s hope for real climate science after all. Yes, a broad majority of informed Germans, at least Die Welt readers, believe climate science forecasts fundamentally are rubbish. Sure this is not a real survey. But to me it’s a clear signal.

 Some online papers have even given up allowing readers to have their say, having grown tired of being told their “news” are rubbish. So give Die Welt some credit for allowing readers to have a voice.

Interestingly, the Germans have a wide selection of words that mean “nonsense”, and one finds them used regularly in reader comments about climate. Here are some: Unsinn, Bloedsinn, Quatsch, Unfug, Dummheit, and Humbug

Now we can add another to the list of synonyms: Klimawissenschaft (climate science). So now when my son worries about a minor matter, I simply tell him: “Don’t worry, it’s all climate science”.

11 responses to “Germans Give Climate Science The Big Thumbs Down”

  1. Bernd Felsche

    Well, there was no consensus amongst climate researchers in Germany:

    http://www.welt.de/welt_print/article1210902/Die_Klimaforscher_sind_sich_laengst_nicht_sicher.html

    Reply: Thanks Bernd. I’ve also added some effects to the Trabbi – hope you like em! – PG

  2. Mindert Eiting

    Analysis of climate alarmism is almost the same as climatology. Much depends on the heat capacity of the groups. For the public the capacity is low (easily scared, easily cooled). This is my cooling list: (1)Public, (2)Press, (3)Politicians, (4)Bureaucrats, (5)CO2 traders, (6)Scientists, (7) Greenies. What do you think?

  3. Brian H

    Super-dooper-bar! 😀

    English lesson:

    His, hers, its;
    He’s, she’s, it’s.

    😉

    In English, use apostrophes ONLY for noun possessives and abbreviations.

    1. pgosselin

      I see I messed up one, but other than that every thing is okay. Though I admit I’m not a very good proofreader. You’re quite the stickler, aren’t you?

  4. Brian H

    Do you have any other sources for the 90:10 split other than your quickie comment rating count?

    1. pgosselin

      I just happened to see it at Die Welt Saturday and decided to bring it up. At Die Welt I’ve noticed it for quite some time now, actually.

    2. Brian H

      I was wondering about polls, etc. Comment streams are possibly “leading indicators”, but are so pre-selected and biased towards the highly vocal that I don’t trust numbers generated from them, though I like yours very much! 🙂

  5. DirkH

    One should notice that Die Welt is a conservatice newspaper. You will find pretty different relationships in the TAZ and Der Spiegel. For non-Germans: Der Spiegel is like the Guardian, the TAZ is like the sowjet-age Prawda.
    Reply: Yes, but the conservatives are also very green here, and 90% of Die Welt’s climate reports are quite warmist. – PG

  6. Toby Joyce

    I am glad to hear that Nature is to be dictated by popular opinion in Germany.

    The rest of the world will be happy to have the Germans command the planet to stop warming. Earth must earn the support of German public opinion before it dares to change the climate.

    1. DirkH

      What warming, Toby? The 0.6 deg C over 100 years that have purportedly been detected? Of which half happened before mass industrialization? That warming? Does it scare you? Then crawl back under your rock; the sky might be falling on you otherwise.

  7. manonthemoor

    Interesting take on the situation in Germany from here in the UK

    There is a site with many comments and interaction where a German view would be most welcome

    Feel free to join our world wide information and fun

    http://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/

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